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47 pages 1 hour read

Henry Miller

Tropic of Cancer

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1934

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Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 11 Summary

Henry, feeling like a new life is beginning for him in Paris, uses some money that Collins gave him to rent a cheap room. On the street one day, he is approached by a woman who notices that he speaks English and asks him for money. Annoyed, he gives her fifty francs. He goes to a bar and meets another woman who becomes emotional on the dance floor and says that her child has recently died and she is living with her ill mother. Henry, not believing her story, invites her to spend the night with him. They return to her apartment, where she makes Henry wait in his underwear while checking on her mother repeatedly. When they finally have sex, she urges him to hurry before leaving him alone again. After dressing, he realizes that she robbed him and hid the money in her wardrobe. He takes it back and leaves silently. He sits in a café and wonders whether either of the women he met that night were telling him the truth.

Chapter 12 Summary

At the end of the summer, Henry moves in with Fillmore, and the two spend time with Kruger and Swift. He does freelance travel writing for Carl and lets Swift paint his portrait. Henry likes the neighborhood but hates Paris during the rainy season and feels uncomfortable about the presence of a nearby barracks. He compares the soldiers to toys and describes their military exercises as “sham [battles]” (222). One day, he comes home to find that a woman named Macha has moved in with him and Fillmore. Macha claims to be a Russian princess who came to Paris on a movie shoot after falling in love with the director, even throwing herself into the Seine during a scene. She is beautiful and intelligent, but erratic and unstable. The three of them drink to excess and argue frequently. Fillmore promises Henry that Macha is only staying with them until she gets on her feet, but he is still determined to sleep with her. She finally agrees, but then tells him she has gonorrhea, and he gives up.

 

Henry and Fillmore try to cure Macha’s gonorrhea and help her regain her health. Macha bemoans her lost innocence, complains about the movie director, recounts a brief lesbian affair, and tells them about the inheritance she is trying to collect with the help of a lawyer. 

Chapter 13 Summary

Macha leaves suddenly and moves in with a sculptor. Henry and Fillmore spend their days and evenings talking about America, and about Walt Whitman in particular. Henry describes Paris in winter, noting that it is an inner cold as well as an outer, literal cold. In a lengthy meditation, Henry notices “what a discrepancy there is between ideas and living” (242) and thinks about what “real wisdom” consists of (244). He and Fillmore talk often about gold, both as a literal form of wealth and in a metaphorical or mythic sense. He concludes that in the doomed Western world, people believe they are free but are merely shadow puppets with false notions of freedom.

One night, he and Fillmore bring two women home with them, and Henry, upon seeing one of the women’s vulva, experiences a kind of mental fracturing; all of his memories rush in upon him, he is overwhelmed with images of women from art and literature, and he comes face to face with “the Absolute” (247). He senses the universe crumbling beneath him, but because so little is true or valuable anymore, he is comforted by the idea of everything being destroyed. In a fit of ecstasy, he understands that the artist’s job is to overthrow existing moral orders and declares that he is proud to be inhuman, to belong not to society but to the earth, and to embrace madness, chaos, and absurdity.

Chapters 11-13 Analysis

Henry has two strange encounters in Chapter 11, each with a woman he believes to be using flirtation or the promise of sex to take advantage of him. This turn of events is fitting for a chapter that begins with the sentence “Paris is like a whore” (209) and seems to suggest that city life has corrupting effects on women. In a continuation of this theme, Chapter 12 introduces another struggling woman who promises sex in order to receive attention and care from men: the Russian princess, Macha. Henry and Macha have a tempestuous relationship and he does not think much of her, mocking her much like he has mocked other Eastern European characters. Macha is depicted as spoiled, self-centered, and mentally unstable, and her body—particularly her weight and the fact that she has gonorrhea—is portrayed as particularly unappealing. In the character of Macha, many aspects of the novel’s misogyny are brought together in the portrayal of women as hysterical, ungrateful, uncooperative, and just plain mean.

When he moves to a new neighborhood in Paris, Henry’s relationship with the city shifts slightly due to his proximity to an army barracks, which reveals to him the “dismal, sinister” (221) character of the city as he had never noticed it before. He also belittles the military exercises at the barracks by comparing them to toys a child would play with. Such a description raises questions about his interest in and understanding of geopolitical events, but more than anything, it suggests that he does not care much about them at all.

When Henry, Fillmore, and Macha visit a “bawdy house” one night, racial difference and stereotyping language again comes to the forefront of the narrative. Henry and Fillmore are both obsessed with a Black sex worker from Martinique, whom Henry calls “a Negress” and describes as “beautiful as a panther” (232). This particular simile is an example of Orientalism, or the harmful stereotyping of non-white people by white people. Despite the fact that Henry’s descriptions of the sex worker are clearly meant to be complimentary, his use of words like “panther” ultimately serves to dehumanize the woman. Her presence also causes an argument between Henry, Fillmore, and Macha; she can thus be seen as a character of color who exists solely to cause conflict between the white characters.

After Macha’s sudden departure, the narrative turns back towards Henry’s philosophical musings, a turn that results in his climactic visual encounter with a sex worker’s vagina. However, in addition to increasing Henry’s awareness about the nature of the world through this vision, the scene also adds to the novel’s discursive stance on women. Immediately before looking at the woman’s vulva, Henry sees a picture of Mona on the wall, and during his vision, he imagines the presence of fictional and mythological women, right down to the unnamed “mother of all harlots” (247). With these images, the novel directly links Henry’s expanding cosmological philosophy to an essential, eternal, core feminine presence. The text is ambiguous about whether this presence is morally good, evil, both, or neither, but that question seems irrelevant in the end. The female “Absolute” ultimately reveals the secrets of the universe to Henry, showing him that even as the world is cracking open, crumbling beneath him, and disintegrating, he has an obligation to live as long as possible in his artistic truth.

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